Page 24

24

KIT

M iller and I spend nearly all of Saturday in his apartment. I keep offering to leave and then he suggests a movie, takeout, his bed... At some point, the ponytail holder disappears. If it had simply remained, it might indicate a lack of awareness—it had been there so long he’d stopped seeing it, or it mattered so little he’d thought nothing of it.

But no…it’s gone, so it belonged to another female and probably someone relatively recent, and I’m not about to ask who it was but I wish I could.

“I’m really leaving,” I tell him on Sunday morning. “I’ve been here since Friday. I still haven’t unpacked from either trip, and tomorrow’s my first day of work.”

“I’ve been a little selfish,” he says, burying his face in my hair.

“I like it,” I tell him. “I desperately wish I could avoid being a grown-up for another week.”

I leave him and return to my apartment. It’s an absolute wreck. My bags from Kili are open on the floor, their contents filthy. My suitcase from Starfish Cay sits waiting in a corner.

But the worst part is that it’s lonely. It’s too quiet. I pick up my phone and call Miller. “You want to come over tonight?” I ask.

It certainly doesn’t feel like I’m bringing this all to its necessary conclusion.

In the morning, I wake early and begin getting ready. A part of me still can’t quite believe I’m sitting here in a bra and underwear, applying lipliner while Miller watches from the bed, covered only by a sheet.

“You’re pulling out all the stops today. Are you nervous?” he asks.

I shrug. I don’t know if it’s nerves necessarily. “What I mostly feel is dread. Every time I enter a new part of the company, I know they’re thinking that they’re stuck with Henry Fischer’s idiot daughter, which means I have to work my ass off to prove I’m not the worst nepo hire in the history of time. I usually wing it until I figure things out, but I’m not sure I can do that in finance.”

“This entire enterprise weighs on you,” he says. “Every time you even looked at that book on publishing in our tent, you seemed to shrink. Please just tell your dad the truth over lunch today and quit.”

“What am I supposed to do with myself instead, though? It’s March. Even if I can get back into med school, I can’t just twiddle my thumbs for the next six months.”

He pulls me down beside him. “We’ll go to Starfish Cay. I can work anywhere. We’ll lounge around naked and snorkel and brown ourselves until our skin turns to leather. You’ll learn to cook. I’ll throw out all the popsicles that aren’t cherry.”

My eyes fall closed. I can imagine nothing better, no way I could possibly be happier. I hate that I’ll never be able to agree.

* * *

Much as I expected, everyone in the finance department is polite but weary, as if already fatigued by the experience before I’ve even had a chance to fail. “So, what kind of accounting courses have you taken?” asks the section’s manager.

“I, uh, didn’t actually take any? I was pre-med.”

Her polite smile holds, but barely. “You can use QuickBooks, at least, right?”

I wince. “I’m sure I can figure it out?”

She leaves me going through expense reports because I’m not competent enough to do anything else, and I dutifully play along for an hour before I sit back and look around me.

I graduated summa cum laude from Brown. I got halfway through medical school. I will soon come into a trust worth many millions. Why the fuck am I here, in a windowless office under these fluorescent lights, going through expense reports like a high school intern? And how many times have I found myself in this position over the last three years?

I could be in Starfish Cay right now. Or I could be doing the shit that rich kids everywhere do: “exploring my art,” “developing my craft,” or turning a hobby into a business and letting everyone think it’s profitable when it’s not.

Hell, I could help with one fundraiser a year and fuck around the rest of the time and just claim that I’ve devoted myself to philanthropy.

I’ve been telling myself that my father’s philosophy made sense: that I should need to know what occurs in every department. I’ve been telling myself that it’ll be worth it when I’m in senior management, simply so that no one can say, “ This idiot has no idea what we do here .”

Now I wonder if it was also a form of self-flagellation. If I continued to accept one unrewarding situation after another because I thought I deserved to be punished.

I get through three more hours. When I leave for lunch, I take all of my belongings because I won’t be coming back. They’ll remember me as Kit Fischer, who couldn’t even stomach working at a real job for half a day , and they’re welcome to think it. I’ve been trying to prove myself to people who don’t matter, in fields I don’t care about, for years.

The person who matters is me. And I’m done.

* * *

I meet my dad inside his building’s rooftop restaurant. “You’re looking particularly well rested ,” he says. If he’s trying to imply something about Miller, I’m not taking the bait. “How was Kilimanjaro?”

I frown at him. “Question—did you actually want me to write an article or was it all a ruse?”

He smiles as if I’m an especially clever child who’s just performed a new trick. “Of course it was a ruse. If you’d like to submit the article you can, but obviously the staff writers will be furious that you got to take an all-expenses paid trip instead of them.”

I sigh heavily and pour some of his wine into my glass. “As I recall, that’s exactly what I said when you first brought Kilimanjaro up. So…how much of this was about me risking my life on a climb I wasn’t ready for and how much of this was about you wanting to put me and Miller in the same place?”

He laughs. “How could I have known who he’d go up with and when?”

I roll my eyes. “Because you asked him some questions and knew he’d go with the best company. It’s a little late in the day to play dumb here, Dad. There’s no way that it was a coincidence.”

My father leans back in his chair, his glass of wine held aloft. “I knew he was going to Kilimanjaro, yes, and I knew when , but I didn’t have any idea which route he was taking. I thought you needed the experience. I thought you needed to challenge yourself and get out of the Upper West Side bubble.”

The conversation pauses while the waiter takes our order and picks right back up once he leaves.

“You knew that he would change routes,” I accuse, “because he’s the type of person who’d worry excessively about me, enemy or not.”

“I did know that,” my father says with a brow raised. “And what father wouldn’t want that exact sort of man for his daughter?”

My chest squeezes tight. Of course he’d want me to end up with someone like Miller. I want it too. But it’s so much worse to know everything he is when he’s not going to be mine.

“Have you forgotten that he dated Maren?” I ask, squeezing the wine glass so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t shatter.

“Of course not. But Maren now has a spouse and is trying to get pregnant, so it’s safe to say she’s moved on.”

She hasn’t moved on. At all. And my father knows that even if she had, this would never be okay.

“Anyhow,” he continues, “how’s your first day in finance going? You were always proficient at math, so it seems like a good fit.”

“A good fit?” I laugh. “You do realize finance requires some very specific expertise, right? I’ve never taken a single finance or accounting course in my life. I’m totally unqualified. I’ve spent the past four hours going through expense reports.”

He holds his glass up to the light. “Are you asking me to say something? You’ve never once asked me to interfere before.”

“I’m not asking you to interfere.” I take a deep breath and push my wine glass away. “I’m not going back. I don’t think I want to manage the company.”

I wait for him to express disappointment or shock. Instead, he nods and takes a sip of his wine. “I never thought you did, but I’m glad you’ve finally realized it for yourself.”

My jaw falls open. “Are you serious ?”

“Of course I am. Why would you want it? You’re interested in people, not management and, for better or worse, you don’t care nearly enough about money…which is probably because you’ve always had it and know you always will.” He sighs. “I should have raised you better. I guess it’s too late.”

I stare at him as the waiter deposits our meals in front of us and hustles away. “Then why have you had me jumping through all these hoops, year after year?”

My father lifts his fork and knife. “Because you thought you wanted it. You were looking for an entirely new life after you left Charlottesville, and you’d pinned your hopes on mine. If this was what I believed you wanted, I’d happily have handed over the reins eventually.”

I huff out a miserable laugh. “So instead, you just kept giving me one boring job after another so I’d realize that I didn’t want it on my own.”

He finishes chewing before he replies. “You see, the fact that you just called all the jobs here boring proves you were never meant for it. All the jobs you did are part of my day at some point.”

“Sorting mail? Climbing Kilimanjaro?”

He chuckles under his breath. “Okay, perhaps not those. But everything else. And if you don’t enjoy the small pieces of the pie, you’re not going to like it more when the entire pie is yours. The way to end up doing what you love isn’t by taking on even more of what you hate.”

I wish he’d shared this logic with me a few years earlier, not that I’d have listened. “Mom won’t be happy.”

“Being unhappy is what fuels your mother. Well, that and diet pills. She’ll dine for weeks or perhaps months on what a disappointment you are, and in a few years, she’ll make a point of letting every person she runs into know that her daughter is a doctor.”

I still. “Did Maren tell you I was thinking about med school again?”

He laughs. “No, my love. She didn’t have to. You never stopped thinking about medical school. Of course that’s where you’ll end up.”

It’s annoying, how well he knows me. It’s annoying that he’s let me spend years arriving at an answer he apparently had on day one.

And it’s heartbreaking that with all his knowledge and money and power, he won’t be able to give me the thing I still want most.